We are delighted to report that Silvina Milstein’s nonet Shan Shui (mountain- water) has been shortlisted for a 2018 Royal Philharmonic Society Award (Chamber-Scale Composition). Premiered by Lontano, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez as part of the Arts and Humanities Word Service Festival at the Great Hall of King’s College London it has also been recorded by Lontano for release on the Lorelt label this year. We’re very much looking forward to the award ceremony in London, Wednesday 9 May!

About Shan Shui:

It has been said that the shan shui (mountain – water) style of Chinese painting goes against the common definition of what a painting is, it refutes colour, light and shadow and personal brush work. ‘Shan shui painting is not an open window for the viewer’s eye, it is an object for the viewer’s mind, it is more like a vehicle of philosophy’.

The Western mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles’ wrote Lafcadio Hearn, the late nineteenth-century writer of Greek and Irish descent. Paradoxically in the 1960s, Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of several Japanese ghost-stories became the source of Masaki Koyabashi’s film Kwaidan, featuring a sound-track by Toru Takemitsu. Treading on the footsteps of these intercultural encounters, diachronic shadowings, and transpositions between art forms, Silvina Milstein’s Shan Shui plays around with notions of time and imagery from films by Kenji Mizoguchi and Kaneto Shindo.